7th International Conference of the European Research Network about Parents in Education DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION ERNAPE 2009 ISBN 978-91-86238-82-2
School-Family Relationships. A Teacher's Point of View.
Paola Dusi, University of Verona, Italy
Abstract
Phenomenological perspectives can be useful for qualitative researchers trying to make rigorous, in-depth descriptions of lived experiences. This paper aims at developing reflections on how to create a better partnership between home and school, and is based on research of interviews on teachers’ experiences of family-school relationships. Interviewees include 19 teachers: 9 from pre-schools, 10 from primary schools. An exploratory qualitative study on this topic was carried out using descriptive interviews with teachers of different school levels. The main goal is to understand the essential aspect of this relationship as it is experienced, from the viewpoint of those who are explicitly involved in it.
Parental involvement is recognized as one of the key factors for carrying out teachers’ jobs in the best way possible, however this knowledge is acquired in the field over the years.
This research provides the research participants time and space to reflect on their personal experiences, allows them to grasp a better understanding of their experience. This is the first contribution of phenomenological research and knowledge to improve and orient teachers’ practices. Moreover, in giving a voice to teachers’ experiences we can explain their acquired knowledge and it can be shared.
1. Presentation of the Study
Involvement of parents is an important aspect in offering children the best educational programs possible (Pourtois and Desmet, 2007). From this perspective, being a successful teacher implies assuming a responsibility with regards to parents. In order to “welcome” the other in a collaborative relationship, it is necessary to trust parents and recognize that they too are adults and have just as much right to be treated as such. Every parental figure has his or her own store of experiences, interests, needs and capacities (Landerholm, 1984); however, they also reveal fears: of being judged “bad” or “inadequate”; of sensitivity to failure; in the need to be able to choose the educational approach which the parent feels is best, as based on his or her own personality, culture and context in which he or she lives, and of the child concerned. Each parent has his or her own personal history, personal resources and convictions. All of them relate to their own children in different ways, with an educational style that changes over time. Therefore, it is absolutely useless for teachers to use an approach that is standardized and the same for everyone, and which requires of all parents the same things in the same way.
For efficacious school and family relationships, teachers need to make a further effort, which should be part of their professionalism, and that is to take the responsibility of parents upon themselves too, in a common, shared path of development that is informed by mutual reflection and sensitivity as per each other’s needs, situations and talents. “Pedagogical tact” (Van Manen, 1995), today, it is also a necessity for the relationship with parents. Although a gift in some senses, pedagogical tact is “a function of the nature of pedagogy itself. In other words, pedagogical tact is made possible by the values and orientation of pedagogical reflection, the conditions of pedagogy, the elements of pedagogical understanding, the structures of pedagogical situations and relations” (Van Manen, 1991, p. 133). Pedagogical tact as interpretive intelligence, sensitivity and openness towards the other, practical moral intuitiveness, and as improvisational resoluteness in dealing with the other, could help teachers in dealing with parents.
In the context of this knowledge, research activity was carried out during 2007-2008 in selected schools in northern Italy. An exploratory qualitative study on school-family relationship was carried out using descriptive interviews with some teachers (pre-school and primary school). The main goal is to understand the essential aspect of this relationship as it is experienced, from the viewpoint of those who are explicitly involved in it.
2. Research Structure
Phenomenological research is oriented to answer questions of meaning. Precisely, a phenomenological approach focuses on the lived meaning of experiences of the research participants. It can be useful when the research aims at understanding an experience as it is lived and thought out by the participants (Cohen, Kahan and Steeves, 2000). Usually, participants are asked to describe an experience they have lived. “The locus of phenomenological research is human experience, and it approaches topics of interest through their presence in conscious awareness” (Polkighorne, 1989, p. 45).
The object of phenomenological inquiry lies in the participants’ descriptions. The goal is to analyse these descriptive texts in order to grasp a precise description of the phenomenon “as it appears” (Van Kaam, 1966, p. 15). In our research the analysis of the interviews is based from Giorgi’s approach (Giorgi, 1985). Starting from an epistemological perspective, this method considers description as a key term. Describing is a cognitive act required both by the participants and the researcher. During the interviews the participants are involved in an analytical process of description of lived experiences. The researcher then produces descriptions starting from the data collected. The participants’ comprehensive descriptions of the phenomenon are the basis for an analysis that can “draw the essence of the experience” (Moustakas, 1994, p. 13).
A phenomenologically based inquiry asks how meaning presents itself to experience by way of interrogating accounts of participants’ experiences, as is the case of the empirical research object of this study. The research aims to explore teachers’ views of relationships with families, the main difficulties and needs as well as teachers’ strategies with families. According to this phenomenological approach, we involved 19 ‘special’ teachers as research participants: they were indicated by their colleagues to be very good teachers. Interviewees include 19 teachers: 9 from pre-school, 10 from primary school.
Interviews focused on everyday experience of teachers’ job in order to obtain a detailed description of lived experiences. We asked the participants to concentrate on experiences they have lived through: the interviews became the “source of evidence” (Giorgi, 1985), concerning the participants’ experience.
These are the main questions:
“What does your job entail? Can you describe it?” “What are the most difficult situations that you have had to face during the course of your job?”
Analysis of teachers’ descriptions highlighted the existing connection between their way of acting in class and their relationships with students’ parents. In fact, the latter was indicated by all participants as an aspect which has a determining influence on their being able to carry out their jobs efficiently, even though it was not the initial object of explicit questions.
2.1. Phases of the Analysis
The teachers chosen to be interviewed were considered to be distinguished by their professionalism and were selected from among their teaching colleagues. The chosen teachers were asked about their availability to participate actively in the (qualitative) research by way of repeated interviews.
Analysis of teachers’ descriptions were carried out according to the following steps, in accordance with Giorgi’s phenomenological approach (1985):
- reading the texts in order to get the sense of the whole
- finding significant statements about the experience, focused on how the
individual experiences the topic
- working out a label corresponding to each significant statement
- grouping them into meaning/meaningful units.
The analysis process aims at acquiring an analytical vision of the data in order to discern the meaning the participants give to their experience. According to this main object, the mind is required to become receptive to the phenomenon. But researchers bring their own worlds of experience. In this case, predominant frameworks and languages are those related to our personal experience about school and to the field of education. Even if the researcher’s experience cannot be considered as part of the data, it is necessary to be prepared to deal with possible distorted interpretations.
Afterwards, the researcher begins a self-reflective operation during which he reflects on these meanings as they take shape in his mind. In this process, the researcher produces a world of meanings, which is connected to the meanings built and expressed by the participants: this is a very complex phase, requiring intense critical reflection and continuous clarification (Mortari, 2007).
Expressed in the participants’ language, the meaning/ meaningful units are further examined and systematically interrogated in order to bring out the sense they reveal, and are subsequently translated into the researcher’s language.
The last phase consists in synthesizing and integrating the meaning identified, in order to build a general description, consisting of a written text, which should give an accurate, clear and articulated description of the experience. Through this text, the reader should obtain a better understanding of the experience under examination (Polkinghorne, 1989).
This meaning concerns the way teachers describe their practices in school and their relationships with parents: for instance, the way teachers interpret communication with parents; the representations of parents; the way teachers talk about their personal experiences; the expectations and desires they express for parents at school.
3. Main results: Experience Knowledge.
The phenomenological method is not a simplifying approach: it leads to different levels of comprehension, corresponding to a “core meaning” (Mortari, 2007) that includes the essential aspects and the constituents of the phenomenon (Dahlberg, 2006). On the basis of the analysis of teachers’ interviews, it is possible to create descriptions that are as intense and as general as possible of the phenomenon and its specificity.
The interviews pointed out some necessary conditions to be a good and effective teacher. These conditions concern both the context and underlying behaviour of teachers that lead to sharing of:
a) a good relational climate;
b) discussion between colleagues as to their underlying ideas (school, child, teacher);
c) a good relationship between colleagues (collegiality)
d) the possibility of observation and documentation;
e) planning that takes into consideration stimuli from students;
f) potential growth;
g) establishing a collaborative relationship with parents.
3.1. Relationships with Parents: a Difficult and Essential Relationship
Significant space in the descriptions is given to the relationships with parent, and is indicated by teachers to be a necessary institutional and relational dimension in order for them to be able to do their jobs “well”. This is called “the most difficult and tiring” aspect of the job, especially when the teaching team aims at sharing the educational process with families:
this is the difficulty in not finding a way, this is the difficulty of negotiating with the family… and to find, at times, the same ways, the same shared ways… this is perhaps the most difficult aspect of my experience … the one that is most tiring. I8/267-269.
3.2. Immigrant Parents
Meeting and dealing with parents seems to be a difficult aspect of the relationship, not so much as for ethnic, social and cultural differences, but more so for the relationship between home and school, which seems to be rooted in the fragility, seriousness and complexity of the parents’ and teachers’ educational roles. Even though the interviewed teachers work in schools located in urban and provincial areas where immigration rates (Mantua, Verona, Brescia) are among the highest in the entire country ( the presence of the children of immigrant families is 22, 92 % at the pre-school, 38,91% at the primary school), none of them perceived immigrant parents as a problem.
It seems possible to affirm that the relationship with adults in general and with parents in particular constitutes in itself a complex, relational and institutional experience that includes expectations, attribution of roles and responsibilities, and mutual perceptions for which cultural and social differences do not represent a crucial element.
Difficulties seem to emerge especially when there is no possibility or desire to compare experiences and to seek solutions together that can be shared. Collaboration represents an opportunity where attitudes are informed by respect and the will to create a dialogue with those who are responsible for children’s education.
a. Professionalism With Children That Takes Parents Into Consideration
The involvement of parents is a very important aspect in helping educational-didactic activity that aims at taking care of children and their potentials. This reflection on action and experience leads toward knowledge acquisition of the necessity of creating involvement and collaboration with parents, regarding educational activity. Teaching is, however, a complex and difficult mission and it cannot be carried out satisfactorily when one of these institutions works in isolation.
Here is a type of evolution which I have done personally, with respect to the rapport with parents, regarding my way of being, my way of relating to others, and this was to understand that nursery schools cannot ignore this involvement, because this is an age in which that sharing is of great importance and we cannot go to school on the one hand, and while the parents remain uninvolved, we cannot do this on our own and the parents cannot do this either. I5/2.
Rapport with parents is a very important institutional space, especially during early schooling. Even if relationships with other adult figures who are present in children’s lives are not always easy ones, they are indeed necessary and represent an opportunity in which educational and teaching objectives which the institution recognizes as its motivating factor for existence can be met.
An analysis of interviews leads to certain factors emerging that are to be considered essential in the development of a good partnership with parents.
3.3.1. Creating Spaces for Listening and Discussing Educational Involvement.
To do this it is necessary to know how:
i. to reach out to parents
The teaching professional is called upon to give proof of his or her professional competency, not only with children but also with their parents. In fact, it is necessary to be able to build a trusting relationship with the family in order to be able to carry out efficacious educational-didactic activities in the classroom:
What I try to do is to have a positive approach towards the child who reaches out to me and also with the family, because the child is very closely attached to the family. Creating this type of relational impact with the child and family right from the beginning is very important. It is important, and I think it is also for a parent, to see his child welcomed by a teacher who turns around and looks at the child and says: “Hi, how are you? Welcome.” The parent can see that the child is welcome and as a result the parent has trust in the institution, something which is absolutely necessary for everything else. I2/2 e 6.